Kerkythea (ker-key-thay-uh) (a.k.a. – “KT”), the incredible multi-method render engine created by Ioannis Pantazopoulos (Giannis) of Athens, Greece, allows you to render your 3D model – from Max, Blender, and especially from SketchUp with amazing speed and great results.
See the demonstration video of KT2007.
For a great overview of what you can expect and how to get started, (focused on SketchUp users – but useful for all) See the Getting Started With KT2007 Tutorial put together by the KT Team.
To see more examples of what Kerkythea can do, visit the gallery here.
 image courtesy of Shane L. Fletcher a.k.a. ‘Fuzzy Vizion’ or ‘Fletch’
“Kerkythea is a standalone render engine, using physically accurate materials and lights, aiming for the best quality rendering in the most efficient timeframe. The target of Kerkythea is to simplify the task of quality rendering by providing the necessary tools to automate scene setup, such as staging using the GL real-time viewer, material editor, general/render settings editors, etc., under a common interface.” – Giannis, KT’s creator.
Don’t let it’s simple-looking GUI or it’s price fool you! This is not your mother’s render engine. Besides your basic ray-tracing, Kerkythea capitalizes on great render presets… like MLT, BiPT, or Photon Mapping (Global Illumination) so you spend your time joyfully rendering, not figuring out how many photons or re-gather rays you need to shoot.
image courtesy of grzybu (grzybu.com)
You say you like making all those tiny tweaks and choosing how many light bounces and regathers you want? No problem - it’s got more advanced features than many users even know exist.
The strength of Kerkythea lies in it’s simple joy and ease to use, as well as it’s many options for choice of rendering methods.
You want unbiased methods? KT2007 has 3:
* Bidirectional Path Tracing (BiPT),
* Metropolis Light Transport (MLT), and
* Path Tracing and Path Tracing Progressive (PTP), (as well as a quick Ambient Occlusion preset.)
Don’t want to learn how to set them all up? Just hit ‘Start Render’ and choose the method in the pull-down presets. If you want to tweak these methods you can quickly load them and tweak until you’re little heart’s content.
Bonus render presets include ‘Clay Render’ which, unlike other more expensive render engines, actually keeps your glass and emitter materials! It replaces all other mats quickly with a flat white surface for quick lighting studies. No fussing with re-mapping all your mats yourself. Also, select any object or multiple objects and hit ‘mask render’ for a perfect mask in seconds (without having to wait to actually render the object) to use in your photo editor. You can also render your Z-depth render any time you choose without rendering the actual image.
bathroom image courtesy of Jendrzych
Materials? KT has a surprisingly simple interface for a surprisingly deep and physically accurate material editor. With layered materials, procedural ramps and perlin noise, wireframe or dirt map effect procedural shaders, and much much more, go as deep as you want to go. But even more importantly for SketchUp users, SU2KT will automatically load your materials straight from your .skp file and map them correctly in KT… basically you can export from SU, open in KT, and hit ‘render’… sounds too good to be true. Not only this, the same material works for all render methods… no special materials for this render method or that render method! Three different and simple ways to handle applying materials to your model meshes give you flexibility to work the way you want to work.
Sun & Sky? A very easy to use Sun & Sky wizard will let you pick your location, and calculate the sun position and appropriate power as well as the physical sky properties for time and location chosen for great instant skies. Sky dome? HDRI? Very simple and painless to set up just pick ‘Hemishperical Sky’ or ‘Spherical Sky’ and load your .jpg, .png, .bmp, or .hdr file. Your sun and sky are automatically imported from your SketchUp models when shadows are turned on. You can also just go to Insert>Globals to pop in the exact sky of your choice and it will automatically set up the scene with perfect lighting on your sky for you.
Camera? DOF, lens choice, set it up as a ‘spherical cam’ and export your scene as an HDRI or export your interior for a Virtual Tour .jpg image. Max, Blender, or SketchUp cams are all automatically set up for you into KT. 
caliper gauge image courtesy of San Monku
Animation? Walkthrough animation tool works well, or you can prepare your animation in SketchUp and it is set up automatically for you in KT. KT supports multi-threading for dual or quad cores, but no network rendering at this time. (There are work-arounds in case you are doing an animation… and extra seats are absolutely free) See some example animations here.
Lights? KT supports your standard point and spot lights as well as emitting surfaces. For emitting surfaces SketchUp users can apply a material called “Emit[2.5]” in their SU model and SU2KT will automatically set up that material as an emitter with a power of 2.5 in KT. KT also allows you to simply choose the watts for your emitter, or choose lumens, etc. Several lighting material libraries are set up for various standard lights with appropriate emittance. There are pre-lit components for SketchUp users who can light their scene INSIDE of SketchUp and the SU2KT.rb plug-in will automatically set them up for Kerkythea. Bonus- you can animate your lights from within SketchUp setting times for them to turn on and off during an animated sequence (great day–to–night effects or saving render times during a fly-through to turn lights on when entering rooms, and off when exiting).
example of double dispersion of light through prisms
The exporter plug-in for Google SketchUp 6 Free OR Pro to Kerkythea and the lighting components are located here. The plug-in comes with a very in-depth SU2KT .skp tutorial.
There are also exporters for 3dsMax or Gmax users and for Blender users here! Kerkythea will also open .3ds or .obj files.
The Future of KT? In beta testing right now is a working version of a combination of MLT+BPT. KT will have better handling/easier handling of object instances and object grouping. KT will have even more material shader options such as fuzzy materials for those who prefer the more sci-fi side of 3D rendering. Not only this, if you think it’s fast now, the current internal beta has decreased render times by over 30%. Giannis is also busy creating a version for the Mac.
If you looked at Kerkythea before and were not impressed. It may be worth your time to give KT2007 a look. It’s vastly improved over what you saw before, it would be a shame not to at least give it a look.
Downside? Besides lacking easy grouping of objects and instancing, the major downside to Kerkythea is that it’s graphical user interface is done using Fox Toolkit. Fox Toolkit is used because it works with Windows and Linux, so when a new version comes out, it is usually ready immediately for all Linux and Windows users. It does result in a less than ‘sexy’ looking interface, and wraps this wolf of a render engine in very benign sheep’s clothing. Also, if you are used to using windows shortcuts in the explorer browser to jump to your files, this will take a little adjustment in browsing style.
In short, Kerkythea 2007 gets 5 of 5 stars. SU2KT plugin for SketchUp users… 5 stars.
PS - For Podium users (a program marketed as a ‘render button’ for SketchUp), they should know that while Giannis is not given proper credit for his work, Kerkythea is the render engine behind Podium, and also that Kerkythea 2007 is much more than a ‘render button’ for SketchUp.
Shane L. Fletcher has experience in 3D visualization since 1996 with a M.Arch from Montana State University and is a designer at Plunkett Raysich Architects, LLP. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. www.PRArch.com
Please visit http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/. Register and join the very helpful and thriving community
on their forum.
I want to express my thanks to Shane (FuzzyVizion) for pulling this together for the Vizdepot community. Please tell a friend.
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